George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who serves his ministry at St Bride's, Fleet Street, in London – the "journalists' church".

Pope throws a lifeline to the Church of England for women bishops

I have little to add to my colleague Damian Thompson's analysis of Pope Benedict XVI's bold initiative to offer Anglo-Catholics a home under Roman Catholic jurisdiction, without losing their Anglican liturgical identity.

All I would add is that this is marvellous news for the Church of England's prospects for making up women priests to bishops, without creating an Anglican schismatic bloodbath. Traditional Anglo-Catholics, many of whom do not want to relinquish their Anglican identity, have had nowhere to go on this issue, other than conversion to Rome with a complete abandonment of Anglicanism.

Pope Benedict has thrown them a timely lifeline. He has also thrown one to Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. The issue of women bishops, approved by the Church of England's Synod, was running into the sand, with a controversial proposal this month to impose a two-tier structure, with male bishops still having oversight in dioceses over those Anglicans who couldn't accept women's episcopacy. Women priests quite rightly resisted the suggestion that they would be second-class bishops.

Pope Benedict has effectively provided a province that the Anglican Church couldn't. Traditional Anglo-catholic Anglicans can go there, under the oversight of former Anglican prelates; married Anglo-Catholics might even be ordained into the Roman Catholic Church. There really is no excuse for Anglo-Catholics who can't accept women bishops now. They must accept the Pope's offer, or stay in the Anglican Church and accept women bishops. It's no longer a case of put up or shut up, but rather go with an Anglican blessing, or stay with the Anglican way.

And so the Church of England can proceed more freely with women bishops. Some will insist on staying within the Anglican Church, to whinge about women's ordination, but it's difficult to see why they should not be accepting the Pope's generous offer to be Roman Catholics in an Anglican way.